Stats for nerds
3recommend
6mentions
4people
2010–2021years
50% recommend50% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- For those of us who've read The Economist for two or three or four decades, perhaps more, "rethinking economics" is a reliably recurring evergreen which gets trotted out at times of crisis. When the paper is feeling merely foreward, a possibility that Keynes may not have been completely wrong is broached. In periods of sheer desperation, a hesitant suggestion that subscribers might read (but never follow) Marx is hauled from the deepest rhetorical powder magazines.
But that's about the limit of it.
The one change I have noted is that where the tactic was invoked only once or twice a decade, its use now seems far more frequent, every few years in the aughts, now only months apart. A search of the paper's archives, or external Web search, largely confirms this:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=rethinking+(macroeconomics%7Cmicro...
Whilst I'm strongly convinced that economic orthodoxy is sharply flawed, monetarism a stunted model like its progenitor, Keynes was insightful, and that Marx's class-consciousness has merits, full understanding and remedy for present concerns must look further afield.
MMT, W. Brian Arthur's complexity economics, and Steve Keen's work unifying capital, labour, class, and energy would be a good start.
- I've read a lot of books this year[1], but if I had to pick one to fit your criteria, I'd lean towards The Origin of Wealth by Eric Beinhocker.
TOoW presents a case for a new view of Economics, rooted in evolution as the primary engine behind endogenous growth[2], and modeling the economy as a complex adaptive system[3].
In the end, his theories may or may not be correct, but I've learned a TON about economics from reading this book, and if the "Complexity Economics"[4] guys are right, it has some interesting implications.
Personally, I suspect that the CE folks are onto something, but this book is worth reading just for the history lesson it presents, vis-a-vis the development of modern economic thought. And for a book featuring a ton of history and on a topic (economics) that some people might find dry, it's very accessible and reads more like a novel than a textbook. I churned through the whole thing in about 2 days, it was so engrossing.
Anyway, I only just read it last week, so it may be too early to call it a "book that changed my life", but I can say that as soon as I finished it, I immediately started re-reading it, this time to take notes and jot down thoughts about some of the implications and actionable aspects of this thinking. It definitely gets a +1 from me.
Outside of that, The Discipline of Market Leaders would probably be the other candidate. I only discovered this one because it was referenced in a different book I was reading, but it's turned out to be quite interesting. The authors present a pretty strong case for a very specific approach to business strategy that resonates with me.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6964841
[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endogenous_growth_theory
- I think the green line is average fitness of all iterations and the black line is a logarithmic index of each generation's maximum fitness to the optimal achieved (both relative to time). So the black line pretty quickly gets bounded by an asymptote at the top of the screen, because the improvements in fitness are far more significant early on. Basically an example of diminishing returns...
There is a great discussion of this (and a further mapping of fitness functions and evolutionary algorithms to a 2-dimensional "fitness landscape") in The Origin of Wealth by Eric Beinhocker - http://www.amazon.com/Origin-Wealth-Evolution-Complexity-Eco...
Absolutely phenomenal exploration of complexity economics.
- Complexity Economics
I've been binging books on the topic as well as exchanging dialogs with a colleague over email. Books list:
_Completed_
The Origin of Wealth: The Radical Remaking of Economics and What it Means for Business and Society - https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1422121038/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...
Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy (Economics, Cognition, And Society) - https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0472064967/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...
COMPLEXITY: THE EMERGING SCIENCE AT THE EDGE OF ORDER AND CHAOS - https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0671872346/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...
Complexity Economics: Proceedings of the Santa Fe Institute's 2019 Fall Symposium - https://www.amazon.com/dp/1947864351?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2_dt_b_...
_To Be Completed_
Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy - https://www.amazon.com/dp/087584863X?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2_dt_b_...
- Suggestions:
Read: Vaclav Smil, Robert K. Merton, Joseph Tainter, William Ophuls (esp. Ecology & Plato, and mine the hell out of his bibliogs), Bernhard J. Stern ("Resistances to Technological Innovation"), Robert Gordon (Rise & Fall), W. Brian Arthur (Technology & complexity economics), Robert U. Ayres (generally, energy & econ), M. King Hubbert, Howard & Eugene Odum, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (Entropy), Peter Turchin, Meadows et al, John Nicholas Gray (esp. on Pinker), Norbert Wiener (Cybernetics & Humans), Joseph Needham (generally, though not necessarily comprehensively), John Stuart Mill, William Stanley Jevons (esp. Coal & Money), Daniel Yergin (Prize), Richard Heinberg, Henry Adams (Education), Leslie White, Kyle Harper (esp, The Fate of Rome), Gregory Clark (Alms & Son), Karl Polanyi (Transformation), Elisabeth Eisenstein (Printing Press), Michael & Joyce Heusemann, William Foster Lloyd (esp. "Value"), Jeffrey S. Dukes ("Sunshine"), Jared Diamond (Collapse, esp. bibliog), Philip Mirosky (esp. More Heat than Light), Paul Buran (esp. his cautionary RAND monographs), Shoshana Zuboff (Surveillance Capitalism, Smart Machine), Arthur Toffler (Future Shock), Marshall Poe (Communications), Mokyr's economic history series generally (the one he's editor of) is quite good.
A long list, and could be better organised, apologies. Organising sources has become its own challenge. More mileage generally from the more obscure and less-read authors/works
Ask yourself:
- What is progress.
- What are value & wealth?
- What is technology?
- What are its specific mechanisms?
- What are their limitations?
- Is there a general theory of technology, if not, why, and what might it look like?
I'd also question your "moral imperative". Why, to what end, and with what alternatives?
My initial read was that the general problem was technological. I've become increasingly convinced it's more political & ideological, and the roles of media, power, institutions (formal & informal, overt & covert), and of information technology (high & low) on media and that on mass opinion & behaviour matter more.
Bad models & priors hurt immensely. Question all, especially those held unconsciously.
- Haven't had time to read and digest the entire paper yet, but I would like to point out that not all economists shun simulation. There has been quite a bit of work around Sugarscape[1], although I'm not sure what the most recent such work is. But Sugarscape was mentioned quite prominently in Eric Beinhocker's The Origin of Wealth, which paints a picture where economists who associate themselves with "Complexity Economics"[2] are more amenable to simulation.
And, indeed, the description of Complexity Economics from Wikipedia reads:
Complexity economics is the application of complexity science to the problems of economics. It studies computer simulations to gain insight into economic dynamics, and avoids the assumption that the economy is a system in equilibrium.
